Definition
A phrase appearing in older testamentary instruments — wills and trust documents — used to impose a conditional limitation on a bequest or devise. When a testator directed that a gift would lapse, shift, or be forfeited if a beneficiary were to "marry into the families of A," the clause functioned as a marriage restraint keyed not to whether the beneficiary married at all, but to whom the beneficiary married. The condition identified a specific family or class of persons and excluded them as permissible spouses without triggering forfeiture.
As a testamentary phrase, it belongs to a cluster of conditional marriage clauses that equity and common law courts were regularly called upon to construe. Courts asked two questions: (1) Is the condition a valid restraint on marriage, or is it void as against public policy? (2) If valid, what does the named class ("the families of A") actually encompass — does it reach only A's lineal descendants, A's household, or some broader social circle?
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Common Confusion
This phrase is easily conflated with the broader category of total restraints on marriage, which courts treated quite differently. A total restraint — prohibiting marriage altogether — was generally void as against public policy when imposed on a widow or widower, and courts applied strict scrutiny. A partial restraint, such as "unless she marries with the consent of A" or "provided she does not marry into the families of A," was subject to a more permissive analysis. The two categories produce opposite default outcomes: total restraints fail; carefully scoped partial restraints often stand. Researchers working in equity reports must identify which category a given clause falls into before relying on any cited authority.
This phrase should also be distinguished from clauses conditioning a gift on marrying with the consent of a named person ("marry with consent of A"), which raise the separate question of whether the consent requirement itself is reasonable and not merely a device to defeat the gift entirely.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this phrase almost exclusively in English equity reports and American chancery decisions from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, where courts were frequently asked to construe conditional bequests. The phrase has no modern statutory counterpart; restraints of this specificity have largely disappeared from contemporary drafting practice.
Several research traps deserve attention. First, the phrase does not appear in isolation — it is always embedded in a particular will's language, and the reported cases turn heavily on surrounding words. A case construing "marry into the families of A" in one will may be useless for construing apparently similar language in another if the surrounding conditions differ. Second, the cases cited in Rapalje & Lawrence (1 Bro. Ch. 55; Pr. Ch. 348; 1 Mod. 300, 302; 1 Sim. & S. 165, 304; 1 Wils. 159) span the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries and reflect English equity practice, not American statutory law. American courts borrowing these precedents often adapted the underlying principles without adopting the English outcome wholesale.
Third, the "families of A" construction requires courts to define a class at a historical moment. When the will was probated decades after execution, courts faced the question of whether the class had expanded, contracted, or become indefinite — a problem of class gifts that intersects with the rules against perpetuities and vesting.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should search not only under this phrase but also under the adjacent testamentary conditions noted in Rapalje & Lawrence: "should she marry during the lifetime of her mother" and "marry with consent of A." Those entries share the same equity-court infrastructure and cite overlapping authority. Cases construing one type of condition frequently illuminate the others.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat "marry into the families of A" as a discrete testamentary term of art, grouping it with related conditional marriage phrases and pointing researchers directly to English equity reports. The entry is characteristically spare — a phrase, a parenthetical identifying the instrument type (a will), and case citations — with no substantive analysis. This was standard for Rapalje & Lawrence's approach to will-construction phrases: the dictionary functions as a concordance, not a commentary.
What the dictionary does not address is the underlying doctrinal tension. By the time Rapalje & Lawrence was compiled, courts had developed a reasonably stable framework distinguishing total from partial marriage restraints, but the line between a permissible "partial" restraint and an impermissible attempt to control marriage entirely was contested. A restraint keyed to an entire family rather than to a specific individual could be challenged as so broad that it effectively amounted to a prohibition — particularly if "the families of A" swept in a large social class. Historical dictionaries in this period do not surface that tension; they simply record the phrase and move on.
No other standard historical legal dictionary (not Black's, not Bouvier's earliest editions) carries a dedicated entry for this phrase, which further confirms its status as a phrase whose meaning was entirely contextual and case-driven rather than doctrinally fixed.
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Jurisdictional Note
This phrase and the case law surrounding it originate in English equity practice. American courts in the nineteenth century applied analogous reasoning but were not uniformly bound by English outcomes, particularly in states with codified probate and trust statutes. Modern American law governing restraints on marriage in testamentary instruments varies by state and is largely statutory.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia — Marriage: Rights and Obligations of Married Persons
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia — Family Court Jurisdiction and Unified Family Courts
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